Statement of the Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to flight data recorders. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to creating a unique profile signature for a flight data recorder.
Description of the Related Art
Flight data recorders have a great history of improving the safety of aircraft travel. As aircraft manufacturers have improved the design and manufacture of their aircraft, the complexity of many aircraft functions and systems has increased dramatically. This complexity has forced the aviation recorder industry to continue to make improvements to its flight data recorders. Flight data recorders can now receive input data from a wide variety of sensors including a wide range of data parameters to help keep track of the multitude of aircraft functions.
Complicating matters for flight data recorder manufacturers, each individual aircraft has a different set of parameters that need to be recorded during operation of the aircraft. As the number of inputs continues to increase, the ability to configure the flight data recorder to record specific parameters becomes increasingly complex. For example, aircraft customers are now demanding the ability to configure their flight data recorders based upon specific desired functionality of their aircraft. At the same time, government and industry regulations require that each configuration of a flight data recorder be uniquely identified, verified and controlled.
The current industry-wide method for controlling configurable equipment is to assign a unique part number to each potential individual configuration and control each potential configuration as a separate entity. This method provide bi-directional identification, where a part number for a specific flight data recorder is tied to a set of specific configuration settings, and the set of specific configuration settings is directly tied to the unique part number. However, this approach has a specific drawback. Configurable equipment, such as flight data recorders, can potentially have hundreds or thousands of potential configurations, resulting in hundreds or thousands of individual part numbers. Managing these individual part numbers and controlling the core hardware and software that control the flight data recorder functionality is difficult using current techniques.